First, shoot JPG to your heart's content. I know a few very well respected and famous professional photographers - not journalists, but ad shooters and fine art photogs - who shoot JPG. Their contention is, even with RAW it's hugely important to get the exposure, white balance, and all that right - only then can a RAW capture begin to compete with a JPG. And their thought is, shooting a dozen JPG variations on exposure gets them a better outcome overall than shooting two or three RAW images. RAW adds to your workflow, adds to your time spent to get to a nice print or to the web, and if you're not aspiring to National Geographic or to shooting ads for corporations, may not add anything to your enjoyment of photography.
All that said... RAW can add to the eventual quality of your images if you take the time to get a perfect capture (not just one you can torture into looking OK from a RAW capture) and like to go through the effort of processing images. I shoot it all the time. It does take up a lot of space on a disk, but as photography is my second job, I've developed discipline about my workflow from when I download images... I rate them immediately, delete anything not rated 3 stars or better immediately, and delete 3 star ratings after a week. If you keep everything, even the images out of focus, mis-composed, mis-exposed... RAW is just a way to enrich hard disk manufacturers.
I'm also not a lightroom fan unless you shoot high volumes of images regularly, have the need and discipline to do global adjustments, keywording, collections, and cataloging. In the end, most pictures that need to be printed end up being adjusted in Photoshop. For low volume shooters who have occasional high volume days, Bridge in Photoshop does just fine. I did a workshop last year where the leader let people work in lightroom for the first couple days, then had everyone ONLY work in Photoshop and Bridge for a few days. It was stunning how much faster people had images ready for critique reviews, and what they had ready were generally also better processed. Most people don't do enough in Lightroom to justify having it sit in front of what they do in Photoshop. Despite the volume I shoot from time to time, I only use Lightroom when I know that I need to push photos out quickly, and without extensive tweaking for quality. Otherwise, I pull straight into Bridge to do my ranking and deleting and keywording.
I look at workflow through the eyes of time... the less time I spend on processing the more time I can spend on shooting. And the fewer times I touch an image - remembering that most of them that are adjusted in LIghtroom end up in PHotoshop for cropping, dust retouching, local adjustments... the faster I can get back to shooting.
Not saying it's bad, just saying it was developed for high volume shooters who do very little tweaking of individual images, and so it's not necessarily a good investment of time to learn it well for those who don't fit the profile of who it was developed for.
